On this Feast day let us offer our families and our communities to God, asking for God's blessing through the intercession of the Holy Family. This Feast presents the Holy Family as the model for all Christian families, and for domestic life in general. Family life is sanctified when we live the life of the Church within our homes. A Church Father urged all Christians to make each home a "family church" and so sanctify the family by making Christ and his Church the centre of family and individual life.

The Gospels tell us almost nothing of the hidden life of the Holy Family, but this silence and obscurity alone is full of meaning. During his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Pope Benedict XVI invited us all to contemplate always the silence and love of the Holy Family, the model of all Christian family life. In the example of Mary, Joseph and Jesus, we come to appreciate even more fully the sacredness of the family, which in God's plan is based on the lifelong fidelity of a man and a woman consecrated by the marriage covenant and accepting God's gift of new life.